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an abundance of bulbs and a microcontroller miracle
Saturday, April 27 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
After a little of the ususal morning routine, I set out with the dogs down the nascent Lake Edward Trail again, continuing to articulate a route on the ground that someone who knew of its existence could follow (while perhaps being imperceptible to others). Such work proceeds rather slowly, at only something like a couple hundred feet per hour, so there was of time for the dogs to their go off on their own adventures (Charlotte) or lie in some place gnawing on a fortitously-found bone (Neville). Eventually Charlotte got a turn with either that bone or some other one, and she would return to it on subsequent outings down the trail as well.
I returned to the cabin covered with sweat from the ordeal of climbing the steep hillside to its west. Then I tinkered with other projects for awhile, such as cutting and splitting some unbucked pieces of wood near the outdoor woodpile. But inevitably I felt compelled to do more work on the Lake Edward Trail. On my second outing, only Charlotte wanted to come.
[REDACTED]
My efforts at improving the retaining wall at the north edge of the cabin's building site has create new pockets for me to add sand. So this afternoon I carried about 25 gallons of sand from where I'm removing it under the north end of the east deck and extended the terrace I'd started last weekend further north. I would've added even more sand, but then I disturbed a phobe nesting in a brand new nest just above my head where I was working, so I put the whole project on the back burner until the phoebe babies fledge.
At some point this afternoon I cooked up a pot of spaghetti and fried up a pan of mushrooms, onions, and tofu. I found a old (but mostly full) Rao's marinara sauce in the refrigerator that had gone moldy on the top, but Rao's is so expensive that I didn't want to just throw it all out. So I scraped off the mold and tasted what lay below it. It seemed fine, so I had spaghetti with marinara sauce for a not-very-Passover-appropriate lupper. In addition to the mushrooms, onions, and tofu, I threw in some of that mushroom-based hamburger crumble I described on the 24th.
At around dusk, there was occasional rain falling when I set out by myself in the Bolt. I went out on Woodworth Lake Road to within a half mile or so of Route 309 to a place I'd gathered rocks on the drive in yesterday. I'd found a huge swath of some sort of bulb-based plant (some sort of lily) on the shoulder and wanted more of them, whatever they were, to plant near the cabin. So I gathered most of a five-gallon bucket of those as well as a few more rocks for the north retaining wall project.
This evening as I started drinking, I decided to take 150mg diphenhydramine to put a cap on how drunk I would get. I then did some more work on my local remote client, to which I thought I would be attaching an Atmega328 for use as a slave source of EEProm. But when I compiled the local remote code on my trusty cabin Elitebook 2740p, the pseudo-EEProm provided by the ESP_EEPROM library miraculously started working. Evidently the setup I happened to have on the laptop, including whatever versions of the ESP8266 boards configuration and ESP_EEPROM happened to be on it, worked. This was going to make completing a working local remote much easier than expected, if only for how much less electronic sprawl would be required. So I then turned my attention to building out a second "mode" for the local remote, a feature to take advantage of my still-unused "mode" button. The other mode would be to display temperature data from one of the other ESP8266s running Esp8266_RemoteControl code. The idea here was to allow me to see what the temperature outside was, as I'd found all my outdoor thermometers useless in different ways. Of course, showing such weather data was sort of a proof-of-concept for adding other modes to the local remote, possibly turning it into a comprehensive data hub for controlling and monitoring conditions in and around the cabin. But as I was trying to add a temperature display to the index web page served by the NodeMCU running the Esp8266_RemoteControl software, my brain started to fail due to the diphenhydramine. I couldn't hold enough information in short-term memory to achieve anything with the code. I had to give up and go to bed, abandoning my plans to take another hot bath.
Bent layers in the 1.1 billion year old rock of a low cliff face a little north of the split rock landmark.
Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240427 feedback
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